9 T ony Foster’s art, the product of sustained observation in isolated places, may look like a throwback to a British tradition of watercol- orist wanderers that includes greats as diverse as John Sell Cotman, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. The sureness and poise of Foster’s pictorial style bespeak both maturity of technique and an iron resist- ance to the temptation of slurred, summary depiction and the indifference to the specifics of reality that it might promote. To achieve consistently the transmis- sion of level-eyed, contemplative views, Foster must also resist pressures—of inclement elements, of daunt- ing commitments of time, expense, and travel—typical of the remote settings in which he chooses to work. The word risk gets used too often by contempo- rary critics, curators, and artists as a term of praise or a boast. It may refer aptly to performance art hijinks such as Andrea Fraser’s or to an immense investment of time and resources such as Christian Marclay’s day- long chronometric epic of found film footage, The Clock (2010). But more frequently talk of risk exaggerates the stakes of creative chancing. As a committed indoorsman, I have a very differ- ent inkling of risk when I imagine Tony Foster trekking up the slopes of dormant volcanoes or sidestepping venomous snakes and fending off insects to work in a steaming, sopping rain forest, not just for art’s sake but for ours in an eco-conscious sense. To sustain the sort of detailed observation that his work requires would be a discipline exemplary enough under condi- tions of studio comfort, but he does it again and again under the pressure of extremes of climate, elevation, and exposure. When I try to imagine what Foster has endured to produce authentic work, I think of Lawrence Durrell’s narrator late in The Alexandria Quartet, as he recalls “the Adam of the medieval legends: the world-com- pounded body of a man whose flesh was soil, whose bones were stones, whose blood water, whose hair was grass, whose eyesight sunlight, whose breath was wind and whose thoughts were clouds.” For the project titled Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild, Foster asked a group of “luminaries,” as he calls them, experts in vari- ous fields of science and natural history, to name the most beautiful unspoiled places they knew of, where he might search for subjects. These luminaries include the British explorer Robin Hanbury-Tenison; the sci- entist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough; María Teresa Ruiz, professor of astronomy at the University of Chile; and Dr. Winslow Briggs, director emeritus of the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford University. Most of the sites that Foster has chosen and that have been suggested to him, he said in conversation at his Cornwall studio, “are wilderness because they’re incredibly difficult to live in for some reason. They’re too hot or cold, too wet or dry or too high—there’s always a reason why no one’s exploited them yet. But sooner or later, these places will go. Mulu”— in remotest Borneo—”is a good example. Because of On Taking the Elements to Heart TONY FOSTER’S ART OF CONCERNED WITNESS Kenneth Baker ART CRITIC FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE (1985–2015) AND AUTHOR OF THE LIGHTNING FIELD (2009) AND MINIMALISM: ART OF CIRCUMSTANCE (1989/1997) Three Ways to Describe Plantlife / Three Wildlife Observations—Tywardreath Marsh Looking South, 2015 (detail, p. 62)
